Although No. 6 Oregon’s 39-31 loss at Oklahoma State was historic — no top-10 team had ever lost to a program with a losing streak of 10 or more games — it also felt familiar.There was a whiff of 2025 Penn State to Dan Lanning’s Ducks after a shocking road loss by a supposed national championship contender.We don’t know, of course, whether Oregon will respond, and it’s outlandish to put Lanning anywhere near the hot seat that claimed James Franklin midway through last season. But an average of 1.7 preseason top-10 teams have finished unranked per season since the AP poll expanded in 1989.What if it’s the Ducks?Here’s the case for and against 2026 Oregon as this year’s 2025 Penn State:Why Oregon is a fraudPenn State started last season ranked No. 2 thanks to heavy roster investments around a five-star quarterback (Drew Allar) who returned for a fourth collegiate season instead of entering the NFL Draft. The thought was that a run to the College Football Playoff semifinals would finally springboard the Nittany Lions from a perennially good team into a championship one.Oregon started this preseason ranked No. 2 thanks largely to heavy investments — its roster is believed to be one of the most expensive in the sport — around a five-star quarterback (Dante Moore) who chose a fourth college season over entering the NFL Draft as a potential first-round pick. It was easy to envision last year’s CFP semifinal run vaulting the Ducks to the top of the sport after years of being good but rarely great.Sounds close enough, right?Penn State’s first loss last year was to … Oregon. Saturday’s game echoed Penn State’s next loss, also at a middling Power 4 opponent (UCLA). Franklin, for all of his faults, usually won the games he was supposed to win but not the ones against heavyweights like Ohio State and Michigan. Falling to the winless Bruins changed that, as did a loss a week later to Northwestern. Franklin was fired after six games (three losses), and the Nittany Lions finished 7-6.Until this weekend, Lanning’s last five losses all came against teams that won or played for the national championship; Oklahoma State was the first unranked team to beat Lanning. I’m not predicting a Franklin-type collapse, but this was bad.This is worse: We can’t view Saturday’s game as a one-off anomaly. The Ducks started slowly last week against Boise State and needed a fourth-quarter touchdown to escape with a win. The team that beat them this week lost to Tulsa by 14 points in the opener and hadn’t beaten an FBS team since Sept. 14, 2024. Our admittedly small sample size is discouraging.The early returns on Oregon’s first two Big Ten opponents, No. 14 USC and UCLA, are positive for the Los Angeles schools. No. 1 Ohio State will be very tough, and if the Ducks can struggle on the road at Oklahoma State, who’s to say they can’t slip up at Illinois or Michigan State?I picked the Ducks to win the national championship because I thought they were due for a breakthrough; years of stockpiling talent and seasons with double-digit wins would finally result in a title for the best program without one. But after two games, Oregon looks more capable of becoming the second team in the past three decades to finish unranked after starting the season ranked No. 2.The other one: 2025 Penn State.Why Oregon fans should still have hopeWe can nitpick Oregon’s Week 1 win over Boise State, but it wouldn’t be a shock to see the Broncos become the Group of 6’s representative in the CFP. If that happens, we’ll look back on the Ducks’ victory as a quality showing rather than a disappointment. Oklahoma State might be better than you think, too; perhaps the Cowboys’ Week 1 loss was an early hiccup by a new head coach and overhauled roster. Drew Mestemaker might end up being the best quarterback the Ducks face.We also can (and should) criticize Moore’s atrocious 5-of-15 start, but he improved in the second half and threw a pair of touchdown passes. As rough as he and his teammates looked, his Ducks still had the ball in the final two minutes with a chance to tie the game on the road against another Power 4 opponent. In that sense, blasting Oregon after a one-possession loss away from home feels like an overreaction.No, the team that showed up in Stillwater doesn’t look like one that can make a CFP run. But teams can improve over the course of the season. The Ducks are breaking in two new coordinators, Chris Hampton (defense) and Drew Mehringer (offense), after losing Tosh Lupoi (Cal) and Will Stein (Kentucky) to head coaching jobs. What if they’re simply going through growing pains before eventually clicking with a loaded roster that’s No. 3 in 247Sports’ Team Talent Composite?Remember, too, that the 12-team CFP allows for regular-season mulligans. A 10-2 Big Ten team will almost certainly be in the field; if the Ducks can get past the Trojans in two weeks, how many other teams on the schedule really scare you, other than Ohio State? The Athletic’s model still gives Oregon a 58 percent chance of making the CFP, even if that’s way down from 85 percent before kickoff Saturday.It’s possible, then, that our best comparison to Oregon comes from 2024, not ’25. In Week 2, a heavyweight dropped a one-score game to what should have been an overmatched opponent. Later that fall, the preseason No. 2 team fell to an unranked power-conference team. But Notre Dame and Ohio State turned out just fine. After Northern Illinois’ early stunner, the Irish won their next 13 games until facing … Ohio State, the preseason No. 2 team that recovered from its devastating loss to middling Michigan to win Ryan Day’s first national title.